Living: Flatpack hell

Why does this store hate its customers? Why do we ever go back? Jasper Gerard looks at the domestic aberration that is Ikea

Every decade brought its own domestic fashion disaster: the Fifties, ducks on walls; the Sixties, swirly carpets; the Seventies, avocado-coloured baths; the Eighties, loft apartments less cosy than an Icelandic rural railway station; and the Nineties: Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. Nothing, surely, could be worse. But, believe me, something will make us look back on the Noughties with a collective shudder: Ikea.

Just conjure the most vulgar three-piece suite MFI ever mustered. It’s a shocker, right? But when somebody chose the monstrosity — now languishing on a skip — from MFI’s 1967 autumn collection, they probably thought it pretty groovy. You can be equally confident that when the nation awakes from its current domestic aberration and slings out Ikea’s Swedish junk, we will be just as mystified that we ever bought it.

If not more so. At least MFI seemed proudly, boldly, horrendously bad taste. Ikea is simply no taste, designed to be, in